Censorship of Literature

At Issue

With literature comes censorship and attempts at constitutional guarantees; legal precedent and common sense have long had to contend with the ever-renewed desire to censor. For example, a bill introduced to the U.S. Congress on April 25, 1991, by a host of statesmen, the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act of 1991, was aimed at distributors of pornography. The bill caused great concern among educators and librarians because it could have been used against them, depending on how pornography was to be defined. Censorship of literature has included such works as folktales and Mother Goose rhymes. Claims may be made that such literature is pornographic.

At issue are such basic values as the freedom to read, to exchange ideas, and to think for oneself. In the United States, such issues involve the First Amendment to the Constitution. Such freedoms require a continual vigilance in order to keep them vital. These freedoms, which may seem granted and long since established, are, in fact, undergoing a constant attack and redefinition. Censorship cases have risen dramatically since the mid-1970s.

History

Censorship is as old as speech. Censorship of literature is as old as literature. The sixteenth century, for example, witnessed battles between the papacy and Martin Luther, resulting in a split in the Christian church and the establishment of the Catholic Index librorum prohibitorum (1559), a list of prohibited books.

In the seventeenth century, censorship battles in England surrounded the Licensing Act of 1643, which forbade the printing or sale of any book without prior official approval. The following year, John Milton published Areopagitica, an eloquent and famous attack on censorship. Resistance to the law brought its end in 1695. Still, theatrical performance, for example, was not allowed in public without prior permission of the Lord Chamberlain. This law remained in effect until 1966.

In the nineteenth century, in England, Canada, and the United States, a repressive ideology, proclaiming the need for propriety, prudence, and sexual restraint, made itself felt among editors, publishers, librarians, and even writers, who felt a moral obligation to eliminate disagreeable or realistic portrayals of life. Novelists as scandalous as Jane Austen were censored in American editions. A federal statute was passed in 1842 in an attempt to limit the importation of “French” postcards. This law was broadened in 1865, when Congress passed a law to bar obscene materials from the mail. In 1857, Great Britain passed the Obscene Publications Act, which established official prohibition of purely sexual material, although it failed to define obscenity. In Regina v. Hicklin, 1857, obscenity was described as that which depraves and corrupts minds that are susceptible to immoral influences. This, in turn, was the basis for the famous United States Comstock Law of 1873, which established penalties for anyone mailing or receiving obscene, lewd, or lascivious publications.

A famous application of the obscenity laws to literature was the attempt by the federal government to stop the importation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), resulting in a decision by the U.S. district court in New York in 1933 that the novel is not obscene. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was suppressed in the United States until 1959, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) until 1961. In 1948, the Supreme Court affirmed that Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) is obscene. In 1967, Congress established the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which recommended the repeal of all general obscenity legislation, finding that there is no evidence that obscenity causes antisocial behavior. President Richard M. Nixon and the U.S. Senate rejected the findings.

After various obscenity trials, the legal test involved came to be whether the dominant theme of the materials would appeal to the prurient interest of the average person, under contemporary community standards. In Miller v. California (1972) a three-part test was established. First, does the dominant theme as a whole appeal to a prurient interest in sex? Second, is the material offensive to community standards as defined by state law, regarding depictions of sexual conduct? Third, is the material without redeeming literary, artistic, political, or scientific value? This three-part test, which made prosecutions of obscenity more difficult than they had been before, reduced the number of attempts to censor literature significantly. This reduction is the result of the third part of the test; it is difficult to show that a novel has no literary value.

Since Miller v. California and since a marked polarization of society into groups of different and antagonistic philosophies after the social upheavals of the 1960s, incidents have highlighted the censorship of literature taking place in schools. A dramatic example of schoolbook censorship took place in Kanawha County, West Virginia. In December, 1973, the West Virginia Board of Education decided that all school districts must select school materials that accurately represent racially and ethnically diverse contributions to American culture and demonstrate the multicultural quality of American society. On March 12, 1974, the Kanawha County English Language Arts Textbook Committee made recommendations of 325 titles to the board, including textbooks from various major publishers, and the board ratified them.

Alice Moore, a Kanawha County School Board member and wife of a Fundamentalist minister, took some of the books home and then contacted Mel Gabler and Norma Gabler, heads of Educational Research Analysts, a self-appointed textbook evaluating corporation. The Gablers mailed Moore back reviews of the books. She, in turn, supplied the other board members and a local newspaper with the reviews, and the community began gathering momentum against use of the books.

This led to a school board meeting, at which Moore charged that the books were filthy, unpatriotic, and overly sympathetic to Black people. She garnered some support, and another meeting was scheduled. Before it took place, Moore began a publicity campaign to get the books banned. This prompted the local PTA to oppose several of the books as antireligious, anti-American, and sexually explicit. The Magic Valley Mother’s Club joined in and circulated a petition to ban the materials.

The next school board meeting attracted an audience of more than 1,000 people and resulted in a board vote to keep all of the books except for eight titles from one series. The battle was to grow larger.

The Christian-American Parents organization and the Concerned Citizens organization initiated campaigns against the books, including a Labor Day rally at which the Reverend Marvin Horan implored a crowd to boycott the schools. These campaigns resulted in students being kept out of school for the first week of classes. The school board announced on September 11, 1974, that the offending books would be removed for a thirty-day review. The Reverend Marvin Horan, joined by Reverend Graley, Reverend Hill, and Reverend Quigley, asked Christians to pray to God to kill the board members who voted to keep the books. Numerous other voices joined in on the anticensorship side; national organizations opposing censorship helped the involved local citizens. On February 10, 1975, most of the original textbooks were reinstated, but they were not used.

The first Supreme Court case to directly address book bans in schools and public libraries was Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico (1982). In 1976, a New York district school board had removed eleven books it had deemed "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy." Although the school superintendent criticized the removal for not following the district's book removal policy and the board appointed a committee to review the board's ban, the school board still decided to ban nine of the eleven books. The ban prompted students in the district, including Steven Pico, to sue the board for violating their First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court ruled in Pico that the school board's motivation for removing the books determined whether the removal was constitutional. While school boards could remove school and public library books that they decided were vulgar or educationally unsuitable, their removal of materials to suppress ideological diversity, including differences of political opinion and religious belief, was unconstitutional.

Two major concerns of school censorship have always been those surrounding religion and sex. In 1985, Grove v. Mead School District 354 rejected a claim that The Learning Tree (1963) by Gordon Parks be removed from an eighth-grade class because it fostered a belief in secular humanism. A more famous case, Mozert v. Hawkins County School District (1987), led to the decision that “The First Amendment does not protect the plaintiffs from exposure to morally offensive value systems or from exposure to antithetical religious ideas.” In this case, Vicky Frost, a Fundamentalist, was sparked to protest by a passage at the end of a story in the 1983 edition of a basic reading series that mentioned mental telepathy, which she considered contrary to her religious beliefs. Obscenity and vulgarity, on the other hand, have generally been considered legitimate reasons for limiting children’s access to books.

In the 1990s and 2000s, several cases involving efforts to censor literature came were heard in federal district courts. In Case v. Unified School District No. 233 (1995), the court, following the precedent set by the Supreme Court in Pico, ruled that the Olathe, Kansas, school board had violated students' First Amendment rights as well as the state constitution when it removed Annie on My Mind, a book portraying two teenage lesbians, from the district's junior and senior high school libraries for ideological reasons rather than educational unsuitability. Other cases during this period include Sund v. City of Wichita Falls (2000), in which citizens sued the Wichita Falls City Council for restricting library access to Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate, and Counts v. Cedarville School District (2003), regarding an Arkansas school board's attempt to restrict student access to the Harry Potter series because it portrayed witchcraft, the occult, and a disregard for authority in positive ways.

In the 2020s, a book-banning movement of about fifty groups emerged in the United States. The movement was fueled by conservative social and political groups at the local, state, and national level coordinating their efforts to remove titles from libraries and classrooms. By 2022–2023, the most prominent national groups advocating for book bans were Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents' Rights in Education. The vast majority of the books targeted by these groups featured LGBTQ+ characters, characters of color, topics of race and racism in American history, or sexuality. Experts said that individuals challenging these books often had not read them. Some of the tactics employed by these groups included swarming school board meetings, making demands to change library rating systems, accusing books and authors of grooming children, and filing criminal complaints against school employees.

The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom reported a record number of book challenges, in which an individual or group requested the removal or restriction of public school or library materials, in 2023. The organization's preliminary data showed that between January 1 and August 31, 2023, a total of 1,915 unique titles were challenged in 695 attempts to censor library resources—a 20 percent increase over January 1–August 31, 2022. The ALA also stated that 90 percent of book challenges for the January–August reporting periods in 2022 and 2023 involved targeting multiple titles per challenge versus challenging a single title. PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans recorded 3,362 instances of books being banned from public school classrooms and libraries between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023. During this period 1,557 unique titles were banned.

By May 2023, several states had passed legislation that allowed criminal prosecutions of librarians and public school staff for providing children with books categorized as harmful to minors, obscene, or sexually explicit. Several of the state laws imposed potential penalties of imprisonment and/or fines. Proponents of the laws argued that they were necessary to protect children's development and mental health, while opponents argued that such laws would censor books by and about LGBTQ+ authors.

In June 2023, the administration of President Joe Biden announced that it would name a book ban point person within the Department of Education's civil rights office to address the sharp increase in book bans across the country. That September, the department appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary Matt Nosanchuk, a longtime progressive organizer for the Jewish and LGBTQ+ communities who had previously served in the Obama administration, to the position. Nosanchuk was tasked with monitoring book bans and censorship efforts at the state and school district level, coordinating efforts to combat book bans, and training school and library staff how to handle them.

Bibliography

American Library Association. Banned Books, 1995. Chicago: World Book, 1995. Publication of current issues.

American Library Association. Censorship Litigation and the Schools. Chicago: World Book, 1983. Proceedings of an important colloquium.

American Library Association. Intellectual Freedom Manual. 4th ed. Chicago: World Book, 1992. A discussion of issues and procedures concerning library and school selection of materials.

American Library Association. Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. Chicago: World Book. Published every other month. Deals with current events, publications, and court cases involving censorship, mainly in schools and libraries.

Blakemore, Erin. "The History of Book Bans—and Their Changing Targets—in the U.S." National Geographic, 24 Apr. 2023, www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/history-of-book-bans-in-the-united-states. Accessed 19 Oct. 2023.

“Book Ban Data.” American Library Association, 20 Mar. 2023, www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/book-ban-data. Accessed 11 Oct. 2023.

Clor, Harry M. Obscenity and Public Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Places censorship of literature in the larger context of the culture views of morality, centering on questions about the definition of obscenity.

Davis, James, ed. Dealing with Censorship. Chicago: National Council of Teachers of English, 1979. Dated but still useful collection of essays on aspects of censorship in public schools.

Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An overview of important incidents, pertinent laws, views of a few important authors on censorship. Contains a synopsis of the most frequently banned books in the 1990’s.

Garcia, Raymond. "American Library Association Releases Preliminary Data on 2023 Book Challenges." ALA News, ALA, 19 Sept. 2023, www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/09/american-library-association-releases-preliminary-data-2023-book-challenges. Accessed 20 Oct. 2023.

Gregorian, Vartan, ed. Censorship: Five Hundred Years of Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. A survey of the historical context.

"Issues and Advocacy." American Library Association, May 2017, www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/censorship/courtcases. Accessed 19 Oct. 2023.

Natanson, Hannah. "School Librarians Face a New Penalty in the Banned-Book Wars: Prison." The Washington Post, 18 May 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/18/school-librarians-jailed-banned-books/. Accessed 23 Oct. 2023.

Ordoñez, Franco. "Book Bans Are on the Rise. Biden Is Naming a Point Person to Address That." NPR, 8 June 2023, www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1180941627/biden-pride-month-book-bans. Accessed 23 Oct. 2023.